


Cornetto Cupidity Love Story

by hazelandglasz



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Werewolves, Athlete Derek, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:41:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2319479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hazelandglasz/pseuds/hazelandglasz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a Cornetto advertisement<br/>Derek plays Wimbledon, Stiles is the line umpire who calls on his fault--and ends up with a tennis ball to the head</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cornetto Cupidity Love Story

Today doesn’t feel like a good day.

Stiles is a little bit nervous—after all, he’s going to be an official, a line umpire and on the revered ground of Wimbledon, no less.

A Grand Slam tournament, and it’s the quarters—yeah, no pressure at all.

Stiles knows who are the players (of course he does), and he takes a deep breath as he fixes his hair in the mirror, trying not to think of the flawless way _his_ dark hair looks in the advertisement covering each and every wall in the subway he took to come this morning.

Derek Hale, two-time champion in double with his adopted brother Boyd. Derek Hale, who has literally ripped the competition out of his way uptil now.

First time in the final square at Wimbledon, though. Stiles’ heart goes to the guy for a minute—he’s not the only one with a lot of pressure on his shoulders.

As an umpire, Stiles has studied each and every player’s style, and he knows how Hale plays. Like the ball has offended him and his family, insulted his dog and served him tepid tea. All strength and power, contained into his racket and smashing back every curve ball into his competition’s face.

But studying a player’s game from a TV and watching it live—it’s very different.

From the other side of the net, Stiles can see Hale getting ready for his service.

Where he looked pure strength on screen, the tennisman looks the epitome of grace and, yes, controlled power, but Stiles is half convinced that he’s not witnessing a tennis game, but rather a ballet.

Standing at ready, Stiles drags his eyes away from the lines of muscles stretched as Hale serves to focus on his assigned line.

His training kicks in as he spots the way the ball hits the ground, and he finds himself shouting “Fault” before he can really realize what he did.

Hale is instantly furious, eyebrows drawn into a severe frown as he shouts that it cannot be, and that it’s unfair, looking at Stiles in the eyes as he yells “Are you kidding me?”, but Stiles doesn’t flinch.

He has been chair umpire for a gala tournament with McEnroe—he can take it.

Hale takes a deep breath and gets ready for his second service, but his eyes find Stiles’ a millisecond before he throws the ball in the air to serve.

And Stiles never sees the ball coming right at his forehead.

—-

Stiles wakes up in the doctor’s office, with his best friend checking his eyes.

"Scott, get that light out of my eyes," he whines, batting Scott’s hand away, and his friend grins at him.

"Alright, mild concussion it is," Scott tells him, clicking the lamp off. "Avoid physical activities, please?"

Scott’s voice turns pleading, and as Stiles focuses on him, he can see a genuine concern in his friend’s puppy look. Truth be told, he does has a tendency to overstretch himself, with the running and the swimming …

"Alright," he whispers, trying not to look at the news report playing in the background and replaying the whole incident. God, he fell like a ragdoll—Stiles doesn’t know if he should feel humiliated or just impressed at the velocity of that ball.

Humiliated wins over though.

Back in his own clothes, Stiles takes the long walk to exit the compound, walking behind the training courts, when he hears a frustrated growl.

Looking up, he can see Hale throwing ball after ball (after ball) against the training wall, each hitting the wall just next to the mark, never on it.

Even though he should feel nothing but resentment against the man who, a- injured him, and b-made him the subject of many jokes to come, Stiles can’t help but lean against the wire to look at him, to look at his back. He’s not even surprised to find himself knowing what expression must be on the man’s face just from the way his back tenses.

Another growl of frustration, and Hale turns on his heels, racking his free hand in his hair. Shaking his head, he looks up, only to find Stiles still watching him.

"You’re that boy", Hale calls, looking a little bit embarrassed. "The line umpire I knocked out?"

Stiles looks down, fingers wrapped around the netting of wires, but he does look up when the player sighs. “It’s my serve.”

Stiles cocks his head to the side, because as far as apologies go, this one is pretty shitty, not to mention more than a little cryptic.

"It’s pretty terrible," he replies with a little nod of his head, trying to swallow around the nerves that are jumping from his stomach to his throat. Where he expected Hale to get angry and lash out at him, he’s stunned by the crooked smile that instead comes into play on his face.

For a brief moment, Stiles entertains the thought that Derek should smile all the time, because it … transcends his face, which was already pretty transcendent to begin with.

"You of all people should know," he replies, and Stiles lets out a short giggle, delighting in the way Derek looks down, smiling at his shoes and—is that a blush on his face?

Stiles doesn’t have the time to really figure that one out, because Derek’s older sister, the formidable Laura Hale, former Grand Slam Champion, the only tenniswoman to ever win all of the tournaments of said Slam in one season, retired as her little brother’s coach, is calling for him.

"Come on Derek, back to work!" she calls, hitting the netted wire for effect, and Stiles can see the disappointment on Derek’s face.

For some ridiculous reason, it gives him … hope.

—-

Two days later, as Stiles takes his train to go back to work, he spots one of the latest advertisement featuring Derek.

Strangely, since the incident, and since their little moment, he can’t call him by his last name, even in the privacy of his mind.

The ad was already up two days ago, but now, it has been … embellished, someone drawing a very fancy moustache on Derek’s face—with a Mousquetaire goatee, it really suits him.

Stiles lets himself smile a little at the sight, wondering if he should take a picture, when an old lady pokes his arm and he turns to look at her, ready to help.

"You’re the one who’s all over the Google," the old lady gushes, and Stiles can feel himself turning white then red.

Once he’s in the compound, in a deserted room, Stiles pulls out his phone to check—well, to check himself out, and yes, he knows how that sounds.

Sure enough, he finds himself the butt of many jokes, memes and other would-be-funny-if-it-wasn’t-him manipulations of the incident, and he’s already considering moving out of the country, out of the tennis world entirely actually, when his friend and fellow umpire Lydia runs up to him.

"The video has gone viral," she says, voice at the thin line between excitement and horror. As he glances at the screen of her phone, Stiles can see the video actually showing three millions views—and counting.

Holy shit, motherfucking crap on the dung beetle’s nest.

But he’s a professional, and he has seen worst—surely, he has been through worse in his life. He can do this, put the incident behind him and just—keep going.

As a couple of days go by, Stiles observes the slow decay of the ad in his train. After the goatee and moustache, someone turned Derek’s eyebrows into a unibrow, then added a cigarette.

And yet, Derek still looks like a million bucks, even with his face defaced.

So unfair.

Especially when people are taking pictures of _him_ in the streets and while he’s traveling, some couple even going as far as taking a picture _with_ him.

The last straw is reached, though, when he finds a carboard of himself—to scale—in the infirmary, to prevent head injuries.

Oh, he knows that Scott would never do that to him—they’re friends, bros … no, just no—but he suspects Whitemore. Jackson has always been a prick, and it would be like him to try to humiliate Stiles at any given opportunity.

But as he looks at himself, at his awkward smile and his too long limbs, a silver lining slowly appears.

Picking it up, Stiles runs as fast as his legs take him to the court where he found Derek the first time around. Sure enough, there he is, in all his muscled glory, grunting and cursing as he throws the ball off-mark.

"Pssst," Stiles calls, trying to go for subtle. Derek stops hitting, shoulders slumping and Stiles tries, a little louder. "Psst, Derek! Hey!"

Derek looks at him over his shoulder and frowns as he sees the carboard. Stiles runs to the door to enter the court, and sets the cardboard against the wall.

Derek’s eyes drift from him to the board and he winces. “Ow.”

Stiles shakes his head, catching his breath. “I thought you could-you could use it for target practice?” he says in one breath. Derek gives him an unbelieving look, and Stiles barels on—in for a penny, in for a pound, right? “I thought it might help your serve,” he adds, nodding towards his cardboard twin.

Derek opens and closes his mouth a couple of times before twisting it into a grimace. “The—the head is a little high,” he points out, and yeah, cardboard-Stiles is a little bit taller than flesh-Stiles.

"If you aim for the head, you can’t miss," Stiles retorts, grinning at Derek and rocking back and forth on his heels.

Derek lets out a deep breath, before whispering a faint “Okay” and getting ready to serve.

Stiles runs out of the way, his back to the wires, and he observes.

As Derek’s ball hit the cardboard straight in the head, Stiles feels pride swelling in his guts, but he stamps on it to run and set the carboard back. “Again.”

Derek’s answering smile lightens up the court better than any of the spotlights.

Ball after ball, Derek smashes into Cardboard-Stiles’ forehead, and one after the other, Stiles goes to pick it up and set it back upright. Each and every single one of them contributes to Derek’s smile.

Even if at some point—when the cardboard seems to have enough and it folds at the waist, only for Stiles to force him back in its position—Derek looks down, and that’s not just the flush of exertion that makes his cheeks and ears so pink.

Derek calls for a break, and without a word, hands his bottle of water (and probably some electrolytes) to Stiles, who did keep running back and forth—the whole thing reminds him of his day as a ball-boy.

As he does go to pick up some of the balls—coincidentally, when Derek runs out of balls from his basket—Derek comes closer to the net, stretching his arm to offer his racket as a plate, and Stiles gathers the balls closer to his chest.

"Come on," Derek says playfully, though there is an underlining of demand in his tone, "give them to me.

"Nope," Stiles replies, walking faster and juggling to keep all the balls in his arms, "not a chance."

"Stiles," Derek asks again and Stiles pokes his tongue at him. "Come on," Derek repeats and this time, it turns into a whine that makes Stiles chuckle.

Once the balls are dropped into the basket, Derek grins at him and throws him a racket. “Play with me,” he tells Stiles, and he’s so playful, so carefree for a moment that Stiles can’t refuse.

Even if in doing so he puts himself right on the line of Derek’s killing balls.

Derek takes another break, drinking more water and munching on half a cereal bar, and Stiles decides to occupy his hands before he can do or say—more likely say, knowing his lack of filter—something stupid. He looks at Derek’s profile, thinking how different he looks from the advertisement picture—Photoshop does wonders, but he really prefers this Derek, the real him.

Thinking about the ad takes Stiles back to the one in his train, defaced and damaged, and he smiles to himself, before taking the “bruised” cardboard and picking up a Sharpie from his pocket, giving himself a magnificent moustache. Once he’s satisfied with his work of art, he knocks his elbow against Derek’s to get his attention.

Derek’s reaction is immediate: he lets out a giggle, that turns into laughter, and the sound awakes the tribe of butterflies in Stiles’ stomach.

"Wanna go for a walk?" Stiles offers, and they throw the cardboard in a corner of the court before standing up.

—-

The walk is quiet, silent stretching between them but it’s far from uncomfortable. As they walk side by side, exchanging a look every now and then, it feels like they’re saying more than if they were having a discussion.

When they reach the central court, Derek gives a wide smile to Stiles before rushing to the edge of the platform, right behind the highest seats, and he opens his arms wide, head thrown back as if basking in the glory of the place.

They slowly make their way to the middle seats, and again they let the silence settle upon them.

As he looks at the spotlights and the empty seats, Stiles doesn’t notice how Derek looks at him. How his eyes slide down his profile, pausing at his lips before observing the rest of him.

How he slowly starts to lean closer to Stiles.

When Laura shouts Derek’s name from the same entrance they used, startling them both.

"Derek what the Hell are you doing? And who is this?" she berates him, giving Stiles a dirty look.

"He’s a friend, Laura," Derek says firmly, and if there is one thing that Stiles wants to avoid, it’s to put Derek in trouble.

"I should go," he says softly, "I’ll miss my bus."

"No!" Derek shouts, and Stiles freezes. Derek himself seems a bit startled by his reaction and he grins at Stiles. "Can you—can you leave the cardboard?" he asks, almost shy and too cute for his own good—or for Stiles’ good, for that matter.

With a quick nod, Stiles practically runs to catch his bus and then his train, laying awake in his bed and wondering if he made it all up in his head.

If he really got close with the hunky, sweet, talented if a little harsh tennis player, and if there really was something in the looks and smiles they exchanged.

—-

The next morning, Stiles is supposed to resume his position as line umpire, and he knows that it’s the finale, and he realizes that it’s Derek’s game.

Derek’s first finale solo, and he spend the eve of his big day playing around with Stiles.

The thought brings a smile to Stiles’ face as he changes into his umpire outfit, and the smile doesn’t seem to want to go away as he walks down the tunnel leading to the court, until he sees it.

The remains of his cardboard self, thrown against the wall and decapitated.

Seems like he did make it all up in his head, after all.

Stiles folds it back and returns to the locker room to leave the piece of board in his own locker, his heart heavy and feeling like he has a personal raincloud above his head.

With a sigh, he walks back towards the court, feeling like he has been electrocuted when he hears Derek’s voice.

"Hey," he is just saying, but there is a breathless quality to his voice, an enthusiasm that Stiles cannot really explain. And God he looks cute in his white outfit, perfect ruffled hair and sparkling eyes.

God, he just applied “sparkling” to someone’s eyes—Stiles needs to go on some holidays.

"Hey," he echoes, not daring to look directly at Derek—he knows himself, he might have a meltdown and cry like a little baby if he does.

But Derek doesn’t seem to understand Stiles’ inner turmoil, cocking his head to the side as he arranges the strap of his bag on his (strong-comfortable, probably) shoulder. “What?” he asks Stiles, his mouth cocked into a private smile.

Stiles takes a deep breath and just shakes his head, looking at the light coming from the court’s entrance.

"What’s wrong?" Derek asks again, taking a step closer to Stiles, and his cologne smells really good and Stiles could just—No, Stiles cannot just, he has to clear the air.

"I found a decapitated body near the trashcan today," he says quickly, and the look of horror on Derek’s face would be comical, but he continues. "This tall," he indicates, his hand above his head, letting out a wet laugh to cover up for the shakiness of his voice as he continues, "kinda looks like me …"

Derek’s lips stretch into a smile again, and really, that smile should be illegal because Stiles could forgive Derek a lot of things because of it. As Stiles looks down, embarrassed, Derek lets out a sharp laugh, almost a bark of a laugh, and Stiles can feel tears gathering at the corner of his eyes.

Was it not enough to destroy his cardboard twin? Does Derek really need to rub the humiliation any further?

He is this close to going back in the umpires’ room and tell someone to pitch in for him when Derek reaches in his backpack, pulling out Stiles’ moustached face.

Stiles slowly blinks at Derek, who is hiding behind the cardboard. “I like the moustache,” comes his muffled voice, and Stiles starts smiling.

Derek slowly pulls the board down, looking at Stiles over the edge of it with smiling and sparkling—okay enough with that word—eyes.

"That’s my face," Stiles says, and he immediately wants to smack his own head.

"Yeah it is," Derek replies, looking back at him fondly.

Because it is fondness that lights up Derek’s green eyes, a fondness towards Stiles.

Derek seems to shake himself from a trance, nodding towards the court. “Shall we?”

Stiles nods, and they take the short walk side by side, hands brushing until Stiles decides to close his fingers around Derek’s.

God, it feels like High school, but he doesn’t really care: as he looks sideway, he can see that Derek looks just as shy, just as hesitant, but just as happy as he feels.

As they reach the edge of the tunnel, Stiles starts pulling his hand away to let Derek go to his seat, to his game—shit, to his finale—when Derek grins at him, leaning forward and pressing a feather-light kiss to Stiles’ lips.

"For good luck," he whispers against Stiles’ mouth, before prancing between the first bleachers, waving at the screaming crowd.

As he turns to wave at everybody, Derek finds Stiles once again looking at him and he winks at him.

And Stiles trots to his spot at the back of the courtn, ready to call a fault if Derek literally goes over the line.

But after his first serve, impecabble ace, Stiles doesn’t think he’ll have to call for many faults today.

Today is a good day.


End file.
